What's the Difference Between Google's “following” a Blog vs Subscribe?

If you are using Google's services, you can “follow” a blog
published on google's blogger. When you follow, that means, if the
blog has a “follow widget”, you will show up there. (similar to
Twitter's “followers”.) Follow also means that you are automatically
subscribed to the blog, from your Google Reader.

Not that the “follow” is exclusively a Google thing. Blogs not hosted by Google doesn't have that concept. Google Reader also lets you “like” any particular blog article. “Like” is something like a “up vote” in many websites. Author can also see how many times a particular article has been “liked”, if they are using Google's service.